


Butterflies on Corkboard (What Am I To You?)

by Her_Madjesty



Series: Twelve Days of Christmas - 2020 [10]
Category: Much Ado About Nothing (1993)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Background Sexual Interactions, F/F, F/M, Hysterical Literature
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-21
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:35:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28209165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Her_Madjesty/pseuds/Her_Madjesty
Summary: After fleeing to London to escape his half-brother's wrath, Don John takes on an unexpected hobby with an unexpected subject.
Relationships: Hero/Don John (Much Ado About Nothing)
Series: Twelve Days of Christmas - 2020 [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2037376
Comments: 12
Kudos: 11





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> On the tenth day of Christmas, a harried writer gave to thee....smut. Modern!AU Smut.
> 
> I am officially out of pre-written work, so all of these are getting written the day before and the day of posting! This challenge was a great idea! /s. Joking - I am having a good time, and I hope the lot of you are, too. 
> 
> There is a better summary pending my brain's ability to think, but: this piece is an entire riff on an art project conducted online a few years back known as [Hysterical Literature](http://hystericalliterature.com/essays). This is 18+ content and involves...exactly what this fic involves. Nothing worrisome or even all that unusual; just smutty. With that in mind, proceed with caution, and I hope you enjoy what's there! I'll see you all on the 22nd, provided that I haven't absolutely lost it by then.
> 
> Re: updates for this piece, by and by, you can expect the third chapter in the first few weeks of 2021. I have the second chapter mostly written at the moment (I was hoping I could slam both out tonight; didn't work) and should be able to post it soon - maybe even within this project's final days.

After the events of the past summer, he walks away never expecting to see any parties from Messina again.

Don John leaves the villa and the island as a whole at the behest of his half-brother. While there is nothing the man can do, not with mere rumors and a few doctored pictures as evidence of John’s own involvement in the scandal, he can make his disapproval known.  
  
He is not there, then, to see Hero reject her once-suitor at the altar. Instead, with a summer of scheming and lying and failure behind him, Don John boards a plane and makes his way north to London. He finds an apartment, settles in, and relies on what little allowance his father permitted him prior to his passing to see him through.

Those funds will be enough to sustain him, he knows, for far longer than his father anticipated. He is a man of simple means. A grocery bill, his rent, utilities, and a bus pass – what more does he need?

(A family estate; a vineyard; his half-brother in this place instead of him – but those are dreams he now has to abandon.)

But even necessity can grow…boring.

At which point, even a man wary of the new and exciting may find himself pulled into the unexpected.

The opportunity to sign on to a young man’s art project comes somewhat out of the blue. Don John has not made a point to endear himself to the local population, but he is approached, one day, by an acquaintance by the name of Pietro, known to him through Conrade, who tells him in a rather forthright matter that he looks bored to tears. He, on the other hand, is an artist, and he could use Don John’s brand of...inscrutability on a new project. As a collaborator.

John rapidly susses out whether “collaborator” is code for “investor” and finds that, surprisingly, it is not. Instead, the man requires genuine aide – or, more specifically, someone to operate a camera while he directs from the side.

Wrung out of sights to see and lackluster ideas of his own, John takes him up on the offer.

It is a mistake.

His first day on the job is relatively short, all things considering. They block out two hours in a rental booth in the middle of the city with a crew that consists of himself, Pietro, a lighting assistant, an aide, and the young woman they are going to be shooting. She arrives some scant minutes before their session starts with a book in one hand and a large purse in the other.

Don John doesn’t pay her any mind until he settles behind the camera for a lighting check. She is perhaps a year older than him and perfectly passable to look at – soft curves, a kind smile, and a confident way of looking into the camera’s lens.

The book she’s brought with her – _Reserved for the Cat_ – rests on the table in front of her. After a few minutes of maneuvering, it becomes clear what else she’s brought with her, as well.

And Don John is no idiot. He is a modern man with a laptop and spotty Internet access. He knows that vibrators exist in their various shapes and forms. He has not, however, seen any beyond the subtler ones that appear in the worst corners of the Internet.

This one looks as though it could double as a microphone.

He must flush or look – surprised, because Pietro leans over and taps him on the shoulder. The two men step aside for a brief moment, lingering like loiterers out in the studio hall.

“Are you sure you’re okay with this?” Pietro murmurs. “I want everyone to be comfortable here. If you’re giving off bad vibes, it’s going to throw off the shoot.”

“I’m...fine,” Don John says, after a beat. It’s not the strangest thing he’s ever done, not after the past summer, but it’s the most...charged. He says as such and watches Pietro grin.

“That’s the point,” the artist says, excitement plain in his voice. “You’d make an excellent test audience if you weren’t already on the job, John. This is going to be _good_.”

The long and the short of it, or so Pietro goes on to explain once they’re back inside the studio, is this: what they’re shooting isn’t porn or anything or its ken. It is a debate. Eros versus logos. Art.

The young woman will, of course, be getting off on camera, but that’s neither here nor there. There’ll be a table blocking anything interesting from view, and Pietro has no desire for anyone to take their clothes off on camera.

John retakes his seat without so much as a glance in her direction. At the Pietro's cue, he sets his frame, leans back, and does his job.

The shoot lasts for twenty minutes. By the end of it, he is half-hard and more than a little uncomfortable, being in close proximity with every other person in this room. The young woman, at least, looks happy enough – she closes up her book and sets it aside with a syrupy grin on her face. When the assistant, Kate, wiggles out from underneath the table blocking her from view, she presses a kiss to her cheek in a way that is almost bashful.

Don John hurries from the studio once their time is up and passes his footage along to Pietro for editing as soon as he can.

He doesn’t...act on the feelings the content brings about, though it almost feels contradictory to Pietro’s efforts not to. Instead, he spends more time than he should browsing his minuscule collection of books before opening a beer, sitting on his patio, and staring at the distant horizon.

This goes on for several months.

The collection, or so the artist calls it, is set to debut in a rainy February; Don John will receive a credit as the director of photography, if he likes.

He considers it for a time.

And then, she arrives.

It is, by all accounts, another upsetting cold day. The press of winter is close and personal; he has to pull his thick coat more tightly around his shoulders just to keep his teeth from chattering. The studio that the lot of them have settled into, at least, is always kept warm, if not for the sake of the crew but then for the women who they shoot.

Don John steps inside, kicking snow off of his boots before setting his camera bag down in the middle of the hall. Ahead of him, he can already hear low voices – the artist, no doubt, along with the crew and whatever young woman they’ve brought in today.

(And it’s been a few months, but he’s not...bored with the goings on here, per se; at least, not the same bored that drove him to this work in the first place. Rather, there comes a point, watching this many women rock against their vibrators from behind a camera, that it all means...less than it used to. The artist could arguably start up a secondary project; the normalization of the experience seems simultaneously shameful and convenient, for lack of a better term. Don John can better focus now on the line-up of his shots and on what little input is required of him in the moment then the sharp intakes of breath from the women he sits across from.)

He steps into the studio with his head down, more focused on keeping his camera bag from hitting any of the small space’s sharp corners. Those low voices – closer now, discussing some manner of literature, as Pietro is wont to do – cut off, the silence almost as loud as Don John’s own footsteps.

He looks up, ambivalent, and nods a greeting to both the artist and his muse without so much of a second thought.

Until the scene registers.

He’s already looked away; there’s no real, easy way to double-take without immediately drawing attention to himself. But his gut is immediately tight; his palms are already sweating –

Because what the _fuck_ is she doing here?

He busies himself setting up the camera and waits – not eagerly, never eagerly – for the conversation to his left to pick up again. The artist’s voice is a grating thing next to tones he never thought he’d hear again; that, for a long, long night, he thought he’d snuffed out entirely.

His camera clicks into its stand, and finally, he can avoid looking no longer.

And there is Hero.

Her face is ashen, as though she’s seen a ghost – and in a way, Don John supposes she has. He is nothing but a specter from her past; a reminder of a bad memory. He sees his own face in the mirror every day; he knows what it’s like to be reminded of his failures, of his losses. He can see the turn of his father in his eyebrows, these days; can trace future wrinkles, and he does not have to wonder at the old man’s disappointment. Legitimized he may have been, but welcomed he was not, and welcomed he shall never be again, not if his half-brother has anything to say about it.

So he knows what she sees.

But she has no idea what she looks like in front of him, here.

Those dark curls have grown longer since he’s left Messina. She’s dressed simply – one of those long, corded sweater dresses, he thinks, and a pair of tights. The case she’s brought with her is much, much smaller than the one that their first subject had, but it’s no less present, sitting at the edge of the table.

Across the room, someone laughs – and there’s Kate, her mouth a broad, red grin as she walks forward and kisses Hero’s hand. Don John watches Hero flush back to life – and something tugs at him, deep and unsettling.

If he were a smarter man, he’d stand up, abandon his camera, and walk out into the street. Maybe to get hit by a car, maybe to bum a smoke off a stranger; he’s really not sure.

But then there’s Pietro at his side, bidding him to stand with that grin Don John’s long grown to recognize as little more than an irritant.

“John!” he says, patting the man on the back. “Meet Hero, our subject for the day. Hero, this is John – he’s been running the camera for us through the entire project.”

Don John – swallows. He’s tempted to look past her, to nod at the wall instead of her, but he can’t. It’s not in his blood.

So he looks at the woman he dragged to the gates of hell and offers her all he can – a nod. Eye contact that lasts for a second, maybe less.

And she looks right back at him.

He feels like an insect under that gaze.

Pietro, for all of his proclaimed interest in the human condition, does not seem to notice the sickening tension in the room. “You’re going to be a lot more familiar with Kate by the end of this, of course,” he says, as though the silence around him isn’t stilted, “but John’ll be sitting right across from you the entire time, too. Don’t worry – there’s no weird zooms to worry about; you can trust everyone here to be professional.”

The laugh that escapes Hero sounds like it’s been punched out of her. Don John looks up – and there it is, a touch of panic in her eyes.

While Pietro doesn’t seem to notice it, Kate does. Don John feels her look between the two of them and tries not to wince as she immediately frowns. Don John turns just as she elbows Pietro, then remembers himself.

He clears his throat. Tries to speak. Fails. Tries again.

“Hero.”

He sees her tuck her hands beneath the table and does not have to imagine them shaking.

“John.”

Finally, finally, Pietro looks between them properly. That familiar grin slips, just a hair, and he takes half a step back. “Have you two met before?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

Don John and Hero glance at one another. Don John’s eyebrow creeps jumps up without his permission.

“No?”

“Yes.”

Kate snorts, but her body language becomes more amused and less protective. She looks to Hero immediately, though, her entire back to Don John.

“I can man the camera, if you’d prefer,” she says. “Or Pietro can. If you two are exes or anything of the sort, we can call this day a bust and figure something else out.”

“No, please,” Hero stands, her expression softening from its confusion and panic. Don John takes a step back, trying to give her what space he can in this crowded room. “Please,” Hero repeats, looking at him this time. “We’re not exes; we’ve just met in relation to...work before.” She takes a deep breath in through her nose and looks him in the eye again.

Don John can’t help but feel that look pin him where he stands; the pin through the insect in its display case.

Purposefully, Hero holds out her hand. “John,” she says again, giving her hand a shake. “It’s...you look well.”

Both Pietro and Kate look expectantly at him. Under the pressure of not their gazes but of Hero’s own, Don John steps back into her space. He keeps his grip on her hand light, ready to let her pull away at any moment.

(She used to wear rings, he remembers, feeling the touch of her warm skin, even before Claudio proposed. Now her hands are bare.)

“Hero,” he repeats, her name a foreign thing in his mouth. “You do, too.”

Their hands drop. The tension in the room deflates slightly, if only for the way Pietro’s face relaxes.

“Excellent,” he says, bringing his hands together in front of him. “John, get situated, will you? Hero, I think we’ve addressed all of the formalities here, but if there’s anything you’d like clarification on before we get started….”

Don John willfully tunes the other man out, retreating as professionally as he can to stand behind his camera. He feels a gaze burning into his neck as he fiddles with the settings – but he doesn’t look until he’s certain that Pietro has Hero’s full attention.

It is Kate, after all, who always was the more perceptive of the two. She’s staring at him now – still not as fierce as she was (and Don John is reminded of another lionhearted woman who is still, to the best of his knowledge, based in Messina) but with unrelenting scrutiny.

John raises an eyebrow.

Their silent conversation is a quick one. But Kate looks away after those long seconds satisfied, which is all Don John can really ask for.

He grabs one of the chairs Pat’s hoarded for himself and gets into position. Across the table – a scant three feet of space; barely enough room to breathe – Hero smooth out her dress before sitting again. Kate pulls back her hair and bestows the other woman with a wicked grin, bringing that same pretty flush back to Hero’s cheeks.

Don John blinks.

Pretty…?

But the gears are already turning. Hero opens up her slim little box and passes her vibrator over to Kate for inspection. Humming, Kate looks it over, then ducks under the table with professional ease. Hero’s eyes go wide as she does, but she shimmies – just a little – and fights back a giggle as, presumably, Kate makes herself comfortable.

(And Don John has been doing this for months at a time; this shouldn’t be _doing_ anything to him. And yet, here he is, fingers twitching and that same dark feeling curling somewhere below his stomach.)

“Okay, Hero!” calls Pietro, taking his seat a few feet away from Don John. “Remember: give us your name and what you’re reading. You’re free to start whenever you like. John?”

“Rolling,” Don John manages. He feels Hero glance at him again, then settle her gaze on the camera’s large lens. For his part, he focuses on her face in his screen and does his best not to think about the woman herself, still too close to him.

“Hello.” Hero’s voice is a quiet thing, even in this small space, but it does not shake. “My name is Hero. Today, I’ll be reading from “Julius Caesar,” by William Shakespeare.”

(Some small part of him no longer present in this room wants to groan, but John is nothing if not a professional.)

Don John steadies the camera as Hero clears her throat. Then –

The buzzing begins.

As does she.

“Act Three, Scene Two. For Brutus’s sake, I am beholding to you.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

The evil that men do lives after them;

The good is oft interred with their bones;

So let it be with Caesar.”

The first few moments are – steady.

There is nowhere else for him to look, what with her reading like this, and so, Don John looks at Hero. There is no black and white filter on her face yet, as there will be in post. So he can see the blonde flitting in and out of her curls with her subtle shifts. He can track the gradual reddening of her cheeks.

(And he remembers that shade, darker than the flush she gifted Kate; frightened, flung to the ground at the makeshift altar she would have otherwise been wedded at.)

He feels her look at him, but she glances away just as quickly, better to focus on the text.

  
“The noble Brutus

Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:

If it were so, it was a grievous fault,

And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.”

She shifts again, biting her bottom lip as she does.

Don John knows how long it’s taken Kate to get used to her time under the table. She’s complained about it enough when he’s gone to get drinks with her and any of their models after a shoot. Pietro will wander off down the bar, and she’ll lean across it, a smile on her face even as she complains of an aching back.

She’s good at what she does, and she knows it. Don John knows it – but he is still not prepared for the hitch in Hero’s breath.

“Here – here, under leave of Brutus and the rest –

For Brutus is an honorable man;

So are they all, all – all honorable men –”

That same part of his mind that’s long fled the scene cannot help but wonder if this is pointed. But then again, no – her surprise when he walked into the room was genuine; whatever this is, this is not about him.

Don John thinks back on the long line of honorable men in Hero’s life and is almost distracted – almost – from the tightening heat in his stomach. He looks away from the screen almost by accident and meets her eye. She is staring at him – and she shouldn’t be, or if anything else, he should adjust the camera so she’s not.

But Hero is looking at him. And her eyes are darker than he’s ever seen them.

Don John swallows, but his mouth feels dry.

“Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.

He was my friend, faithful and just to me:

But Brutus says he was ambitious;

And Brutus is an honorable man.

He hath brought many captives home to Rome

Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:

Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?”

The lull of her voice is almost hypnotizing; he feels himself sinking into it, even as her tongue trips over every “ambitious.” He’s staring at her outright now – and he knows he shouldn’t be; knows that, at a minimum, giving her space; letting her have this moment, whatever it is, without the taint of him on it.

But she’s brought herself here – and he can’t help but wonder why. Why is her left hand bare, why isn’t she in Messina, why, why, why –

He may know better than Claudio, now, the way that she looks in a heated moment. The heat in his belly flares, a fire that threatens to overwhelm him. He hears his own ragged breath and forces himself back in his seat, trying to ignore the way he’s unconsciously moved to close the gap between the two of them.

“When the poor have cried,” Hero continues, her voice a breathy thing, “Caesar hath wept:

Ambition should be made of sternr stuff:

Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;

And Brutus is an honorable man.”

Her hips jump. Don John digs a hand into his thigh as her reading pauses, that last “honorable” long on her tongue as she tries to come back to herself. Her breath is coming faster now; he can see it in the rise and fall of her chest. It does not take much to imagine what Kate must be seeing underneath the table between them: a pair of tensing thighs, stripped bare of those tights, the heat coming off of Hero in waves.

For a moment – no, not for a moment. Outright, Don John envies her. He does not want to acknowledge the longing pulsing through his own veins, but there is no denying it.

Hero has long been a beautiful woman; she was a jewel in Messina, just as she is here. And he is not a blind man. In the days before whatever rebellion he brought down on his half-brother’s head, before that long summer and her near wedding, he watched her with an eye that wanted yet did not want. The rare, courteous smiles she would grant him were more than anything ever offered by the others of her house, and more fool him, he clung to them. Scraps, they were, and nothing more – and that hatred dips into the fire of him. And yet, they were something.

Hero was never not kind to him, not before he went and damned her.

This, then, is her revenge. She is staring at him outright now, in what moments she can keep her eyes open or away from the pages of her book. Her pupils are blown wide, and he can see her fingers clenching as she clings to the book’s cover.

“You all did see that on the Lupercal

I thrice presented him a kingly crown,

Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?

Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;

And, sure, he is an honorable man.”

There is a long stretch of silence – but no. Don John watches Hero close her eyes and gasp, nearly rising out of her chair. He can imagine Kate’s hand on her thigh, forcing her back down, and he cannot help but hate the other woman for it.

Hero lets out a low moan that echoes through the studio. It embeds itself within John’s soul, as though it intends to live there, right next to his memory of her wounded, frightened eyes.

“I speak not – not to disprove what Brutus spoke,” Hero gasps,

“But here...here I am to speak what I do know.”

She speaks faster, the words pouring from her as though from the damaged spout.

“You all – you all did love him once, not without cause:

What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?”

That same, high-pitched whine empties the room until it is just the two of them. Hero looks at him from beneath her lashes, beads of sweat appearing on her forehead. She bites her lip and stares – seeing him, John thinks, and not. Her mouth parts, and he can see her quivering; can almost feel the soft press of her skin beneath his hands.

“Oh, judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,” Hero spits, Hero sings, Hero sighs,

“And men...men have lost their reason. Bear with me;

My heart – my heart – my heart -”

She reaches up and presses a hand to her chest.

And Don John feels himself mouth a word. He does not care that he is on the edge of his seat; does not care that his cock is straining against pants that are far, far too nice for an environment like this. All he cares about is Hero; about that drop of sweat that’s skating down her cheek; about the way she presses against her heart and drops her gaze to his mouth as he whispers: “Cum.”

And she does.

Her head falls back; those long curls crest over the edge of the chair she’s sitting in. Don John loses himself in them, loses himself in the way she bites her lip to keep her noises in but in the way, too, that those noises escape: desperate, needy sounds that sound like music in his ears. She rocks her hips forward beneath the table, and he wants to feel them; wants the press of her heat against his cock; wants that clench; wants to tangle his fingers in her hair and pull her mouth to his as she rides out the aftershocks.

She comes down slowly, seconds ticking away on camera. And yet there is Don John, hapless across from her and harder than he’s ever been in his life.

The buzzing stops.

After a second more, Hero opens her eyes. Her gaze is a distant thing, almost hungover, but she manages to look at the camera again.

(Not at him. Hero does not look at him.)

“My name is Hero,” she says to the camera, her voice still high but steady, steady. “And that was William Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar.’”

She closes the book in front of her – then collapses back in the chair. Across the room, Pietro starts to applaud.

And suddenly, there are people in the room again.

Don John blinks. He manages to stop the camera’s rolling just as Kate wriggles out from underneath the table bearing her trademark, shit-eating grin. At once, her arms are around Hero, and the two women cling to one another, Hero overcome with a quiet fit of manic laughter.

Looking at them hurts.

Looking at them _aches_.

Without a word, Don John stands. He makes eye contact with Pietro and sees a flash of sympathy, but he is out of the room before the artist can say a word.

There is a bathroom down the hall. He steps in, locks the door –

Tries to breathe.

Without shame or a thought, he presses his hand to his aching cock. He can feel heat through the fabric and undoes his zipper as quickly as he can.

There’s so little to imagine. He knows, now, what Hero looks like when the world’s dropped away, and that is something he will never forget, not as long as he lives. Somewhere, he knows he shouldn’t be doing this; that he should walk home and turn on the television and drink until this day is no more than a distant memory.

But the curve of her neck as her head fell back –

And the clench of her hand against her chest –

And the rise and fall of her breasts; the curtain of her hair; those flushed cheeks, those lips that begged –

The look in her eye before she snapped, staring at him, listening to him when he told her to cum –

Don John bites into the back of his hand to keep from making a single sound as he cums. The bathroom is silent save for sound of his hand on his cock and his own ragged breathing.

For a second, in the aftermath, the world is at peace. He is floating, he is satisfied –

And then there’s the shame.

Don John lets his head fall against the stall door, muttering curses under his breath. The cool metal does little to ground him; if anything, it sends him reeling away from this moment, back into that studio where Hero is undoubtedly gathering her things while Pietro apologizes for his wayward cameraman.

He breathes.

He breathes.

And after another minute has passed, Don John straightens his spine.

He cleans up as best he can, trying not to think too hard about the cleanliness of this general space or the smell that seems to cling to him, now. Instead, he meets his own gaze in the mirror and stares until the world feel right; until he can carry a core of disinterest with him back into that small studio.

By the time he arrives, both Hero and Kate are gone. Pietro is standing by the camera, checking his phone.

Don John tells himself that the drop of his gut is not disappointment and instead clears his throat. He does not apologize, but he does incline his head when Pietro looks his way.

“The girls went on ahead,” Pietro tells him, that smile ever-present in his voice. He claps Don John on the shoulder again, then lets the other man come forward to start gathering up his tools. “They’re getting drinks down at Padua’s. I figured I’d join them once you were done.”

There’s an invitation there – and a bit of a joke, too. Don John scowls as he packs away his things, trying to ignore the awkward twinge in his knees.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

To his complete lack of surprise, Pietro chuckles. “Your loss,” he says before moving away. He shrugs on his own coat, then makes a point of inspecting his nails as Don John zips his camera bag closed.

They walk out of the studio together, despite John’s fervent wish otherwise. Out on the street, the winter cold makes him long for Messina in a moment, but it is a thought that he rapidly shoves away.

At his side, Pietro frowns at his cellphone, then glances in his direction.

“John,” he says, “did you grab the – uh, the camera stand?”

John raises an eyebrow, then glances down at his travel-sized camera bag.

Pietro sucks on his teeth. “Oof. Could you run back in and get it? We’re not going to make it back to the studio until the holidays are over, and I don’t want one of the fucking grad students to think that it’s fair game.”

Don John levels him a look verging on bored. “You assume I have a use for it?”

For half a second, Pat’s look is nearly demeaning. “John. You have your own Sony F800.”

John opens his mouth – then pauses. With a grunt, he turns on his heel and heads back into the building.

“Thanks, buddy!” calls Pietro, content in his place on the sidewalk. “I’ll wait for you; I’ll even give you a ride home.”

Don John says nothing under his breath, though in the privacy of his head, he takes a long moment to imagine a perfectly innocent scenario in which the man gets hit by a car before he’s able to make his way back out into the street.

It takes him less than a minute to dismantle the camera stand and to tuck it under his arm.

Too late, though, he notices….

 _It_.

They haven’t broken down the room properly; the table and table cloth are still in place. And Hero – has forgotten a few things

Her coat, for one, though Don John doesn’t know how she’s faring without, given the unforgiving winter breeze.

For two…

The box she brought her vibrator in sits prettily on the table’s corner.

Mocking him.

This time, Don John swears aloud.

He considers abandoning the camera stand altogether, marching from the room and pushing Pietro into traffic himself. More fool he for imagining that something like this wouldn’t happen; he is long the victim of schemers, and it seems he will ever retain that role.

He gathers up Hero’s coat, leaving the camera stand in its place. Then, with a delicate hand, he reaches out and tucks the vibrator’s box into one of its many folds.

By the time he steps back out onto the street, a high flush has risen in his cheeks. He scowls at Pietro, who’s still standing where he was left, hands shoved cheerily into his pockets.

“Oh!” the artist says, the picture of surprise. “Is that Hero’s coat? Damn, we’ll have to get that to her; it’s way too cold to go without one.” He eyes Don John for a long second, then starts to smile again. “Here – give it to me. I’m heading to the bar, anyway; you can head on home. I know it’s been a long day.”

It hasn’t. It’s been maybe an hour since he arrived at the studio. Their session even concluded well within their allotted time; Hero was...quick.

But despite it all – despite the obvious ploy; despite the shame in his gut; despite _everything_ – John feels himself pull the coat and vibrator closer to his chest.

After a beat, Pietro raises an eyebrow.

And John remembers – words.

He can use his words.

“I’ll take them,” he says, his voice nothing more than a gravelly bark. “But you drive.’

Pietro beams at him and slaps him on the arm. “Atta boy,” he says, dragging John forward. “Come on, my car’s around back, and my dick’s gonna fall off if we stay out here any longer.”

“Truly a disaster in the making,” John mutters. Whether Pietro hears him and chooses to ignore him or doesn’t notice his mutterings at all, he will never know.

Within a matter of minutes, the two of them are bundled up in a two-seater and making their way out of a parking garage, off to Padua’s and the women already waiting there.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _"I'll post again before the end of the year," she said. "I already have most of the next part written," she said._
> 
> ...hi there. 
> 
> Apologies for disappearing for so long! Apparently writing nearly 80k words in a month actually put me out for a bit. I kept trying to come back to this, but it was more difficult than I anticipated. With that in mind, I don't precisely have an update schedule, but know that I'm loathed to leave things unfinished. You may get the final installment to this piece sooner than you think.
> 
> Thank you so much for your patience and for all of your support last December. I hope all of you readers are hanging in there, given the state of the world and the auspicious anniversary we're all approaching.

The thing about a bar – any bar in the world – is that it’s just a little bit liminal.

Hero sits in a corner booth listening to Kate talk about...her sister, maybe, while all around them, the post-work crowd begins to make its way inside. Out on the street, people walk or storm past, backpacks and briefcases and umbrellas in hand as London’s noncommittal fall of slush peppers the sidewalk.

The bar itself isn’t particularly remarkable; one of the smaller pubs off of St. Pancreas Station meant to attract more tourists than locals. Kate likes it, though, and while Hero’s only been here for a matter of minutes, she finds herself becoming...fond of it.

It’s liminal, after all. If she leans back in the seat, it’s nearly impossible to distinguish from the dozens of other bars she’s been in over the course of the past year. The drink she’s nursing – honey and spice and chocolate and brandy – is marginally better than the one she’d had in Liverpool, but not as good as the one she’d had in America; something with pomegranate liqueur and spritzer in a bar lovingly referred to as The Back Door.

Time isn’t real here. Everything she’s been through – everything she’s seen. It doesn’t have to be real here.

The thing about these bars – all of them – is that it isn’t their drinks that Hero comes to them for. Rather, it’s for the company.

*

The year or so since Messina – Messina, with its sunlight and its bloody knuckles and iron on her tongue – has been long.

It’s been even lonelier.

*

A year ago.

Come her not-a-wedding, Hero finds herself left with an empty house, bereft of not only would-be lover but cousin, as well. Beatrice kisses her on the cheeks before she leaves, her new husband on her arm. She bids Hero to come with them – but Hero sees the look in her cousin’s eye, the one that spells mischief, and declines for Benedick’s sake. Instead, she waves goodbye to the both of them from the window of a slowly-emptying house, then watches as Don Pedro and his variable troop depart not long after.

In the silence that follows, she listens for her father’s footsteps in the halls. And all the while, she waits – waits for something, anything to shake life back into the place she’d once so loved.

But every corner reeked of Claudio and the secrets they shared that summer. Every shadow brings her up short; every man’s voice in the halls raised a little louder than it should be, makes her ache for the comforts of her room.

And through it all, her father – Leonato, the man who’d once sworn to protect her – disappears.

She sees him at dinners, rare though they were. He makes a point, though, to go on business trips or to spend long hours at the office or to lock himself away, far from her sight and the sight of all others.

In the space he leaves behind, Hero is left with nothing but the memory of his laughter and whispers from all those around her about the fate of her would-be husband.

A mere month of this is almost too much to bear.

So she leaves.

Her father allows her both her inheritance and an allowance when she goes. It is more, she knows, for his own heart than for her sake, but she accepts both gladly. With a bag in one hand and her passport in the other, she spends the next half year wandering first through Italy, then through greater Europe, and then through the United States.

Come winter, she finds herself standing outside of St. Pancreas Station, back in Europe via Heathrow and anxious on the rowdy streets of London.

Adrift, she settles in a long-term flat, alternating between walking Oxford Street and Borough Market.

More to the point, she waits – and waits – for the nightmares plaguing her sleep to _stop_.

But at least once a week, there stands Claudio, his hands tight on her wrists. There stands Don Pedro, his friendly face turned to scowling. There, in the darkest of corners, stands Don John, watching her with cold eyes before turning away, leaving her to stare up at a would-be husband who bears nothing but hatred in his gaze.

Hero wakes from all of these dreams crying, aching, longing for something to which she cannot put a name.

And so, the days carry on.

Until –

Pietro.

Hero stumbles across Pietro on the University of London campus. She is in the process of masquerading as a student, walking past a career fair even as everyone around her shuffles about, tense with worry over their final exams. He spots her in the crowd and grins a grin that looks too much like Beatrice’s before flagging her down, a wry expression in his eyes.

“Playing pretend?” he asks, falling into step beside her.

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Ah, c’mon,” his accent is thick, but Hero’s spent the past half-year adjusting to accents she can’t always understand. “I know what the students around here look like, love, and you’re way too calm to be anything of the sort.”

Hero feels her brow furrow as a distant wariness raises its head in her chest. “Is there something wrong with me being here?” she asks, voice quiet but steady.

Pietro shoves his hands into his pockets. “‘Course not,” he tells her. “But if you’re not a student, then we can talk like people instead of like desperate pups meeting professionals.”

Hero tilts her head, confused, and lets Pietro explain.

Over Costa coffee, he tells her his story: he’s a transplant out of Liverpool, not that it’s far to transplant, and more importantly, he’s an artist. A director, if anyone wants to be specific, and he’s in the middle of a project that pays a least a little, if not in credit then in drinks after a day’s shoot is done. He leaves his card with her after their...coffee date and lets her know that if she’s interested in joining on with the crew, she’s more than welcome.

Hero watches him go over her tea, her confusion generally unabated. He flies into the arms of a dark-haired woman across the street, though, with such a genuine smile on his face that she cannot help but warm to him, just a little.

His card is scant on details, but it includes both his phone number and his email.

Three days later, in a fit of what feels like blessed boredom, she calls him up.

He explains his project all in one breath, as though he’s afraid he’s going to scare her off. Hero understands the concern – what he’s doing sounds unconventional, to say the least, and...pornographic, at the most.

“It’s not porn!” he all but shouts down the phone line – and to her surprise, Hero does not cower back. Instead, she borrows a page from her cousin’s book and laughs at him, the sound almost tentative but brave, too, to the point where he starts laughing with her.

She takes another night to think about it – to weigh the options over in her head.

Come the next morning, though, there are tears on her cheeks and only a little breath in her lungs.

So Hero calls him

And Hero agrees.

The next thing she knows, she’s clutching a familiar book in front of a too-small studio, letting Pietro bundle her inside before the worst of the winter weather can freeze her fingers off.

“You’re an absolute treasure for taking this kind of shit on, love,” he tells her, taking her coat off only after asking her permission. Hero smiles at him and tries to ignore the way her hands are shaking around her bag.

Across the studio – though there’s no real “across”; more “five feet away” – the same dark-haired woman Pietro had run to after their coffee date shakes her head. The look she gives Hero is...hungry, for lack of another word, but in a friendly sort of way.

“Forgive him,” she says, wrapping an arm around Hero’s shoulders. “His cheer is a strange and unnatural thing.”

Pietro offers her the two finger salute, and within a moment, the tension in the air has eased. Hero laughs and lets the woman – Kate – talk her through the session to come as she settles in behind a table.

She’s just smoothing the tablecloth, listening to Kate and Pietro...bitch, there’s really no other word for it, when the cameraman comes in.

And of course Pietro had mentioned the camera and its man; he’d even called the man by name. But there are thousands of Johns in the world, let alone in London, so Hero hadn’t thought anything of it at the time.

But it is a familiar head of dark hair who darkens the studio’s door; a familiar crooked nose; a familiar set of dark eyes, stopping on her and –

Glancing over her?

Hero blinks and, in her shock, misses the way Don John’s shoulders stiffen.

Does he not…

Recognize her?

The air is tense, that’s for sure, so she redirects her attention to Kate and Pietro, trying her best to keep her confusion and concern out of her face. As the cameraman settles, though, she sneaks another look. And yes, that’s him; the same man who’d stood at the altar behind Claudio; the same man Don Pedro had threatened within an inch of his life the evening the man had been bundled up and sent back to Leonato’s villa.

Their eyes meet for an instant –

And ah.

Yes.

He recognizes her.

Hero does not allow herself to stare, and it’s clear, in a moment, that he’s making a similar choice. He puts as much space between the two of them as is physically possible in this cramped little room – not fearful, as far as Hero can tell.

There is an old fear in her, of course – the last time they’d been together, her whole life had fallen apart. But there is a tentative recognition, too. Almost a relief. An “oh, there you are” that confuses her and frustrates her and –

Oh. Kate is saying something.

Kate, in fact, looks like Beatrice in all of her might, bodily standing between Don John and Hero as Pietro, oblivious, tries to introduce them.

“John!” he says, patting the man on the back. “Meet Hero, our subject for the day. Hero, this is John – he’s been running the camera for us through the bulk of the project.”

Hero tries to say something, but her voice lodges in her throat.

Pietro carries on, even as Kate’s hackles start to rise. “You’re going to be a lot more familiar with Kate by the end of this, of course,” he says, as though the silence around him isn’t stilted, “but John’ll be sitting right across from you the entire time, too. Don’t worry – there are no weird zooms to worry about; you can trust everyone here to be professional.”

Oh, lord. Hero laughs – she can’t help it, can’t stop the noise as it forces its way out of her. She can’t even say anything, damn this small space, as something sad and tired and hysterical threatens to rise up and overwhelm her.

She’s barely managed to push the impulse down by the time Don John clears his throat. Even then, his gaze is – awkward, there’s no other way to put it.

“Hero,” he says into the space between them.

Hero feels a giggle huff and die behind her lips. “John.”

Pietro looks at her – really looks at her, for once. Hero sees him narrow his eyes. “Have you two met before?”

“No!” The word is out of Hero’s mouth before she can stop it, but it rings in blessed contrast with Don John’s “yes.”

The two of them look at one another. Don John frowns.

Hero considers screaming.

“No?” Don John offers out into the room. It’s drowned out, though, by Hero’s reluctant “yes.”

Kate snorts. Her body language shifts, Hero sees, but she is still a wall, still the perfect barrier between the two of them.

“I can man the camera, if you’d prefer,” she says, turning her back on Don John entirely. “Or Pietro can. If you two are exes or anything of the sort, it’s going to ruin the vibe of the project.”

“No, please,” Hero cannot help but stand and reach out to her, putting hand on the other woman’s arm.

(It has been a long, long year since she’d bid Claudio goodbye; since Don John had disappeared from her father’s villa ahead of his brother. And Hero is many things – patient, or so says her cousin, and empathetic, and kind. But Hero is also so, so tired of startling at her own shadow – of being afraid at all.)

“Please.” she says, looking to Don John this time. “We’re not exes; we’ve just met in relation to...work before.” She takes a deep breath in through her nose and looks him in the eye again.

There is no malice in him; that she can see in an instant. He is as uncomfortable to have found her here as she is to be here.

And that – though it is not an apology, though it is nothing in light of what he did to her – is something she can work with.

Hero holds out her hand. “John,” she repeats into the still air. When Don John doesn’t move, she gives her hand a little shake. “It’s...you look well.”

It feels like a small eternity passes before Don John reaches back. His grip, when he touches her, is barely present, as though he expects her to disappear beneath his fingers.

“Hero,” he repeats, her name a foreign thing in his mouth. “You do, as well.”

Their hands drop. The tension in the room deflates slightly, if only for the way Pietro’s face relaxes.

“Excellent,” he says, bringing his hands together in front of him. “John, get situated, will you? Hero, I think we’ve addressed all of the formal needs here, but if there’s anything you’d like clarification on before we get started….”

And Hero listens to him – she swears she does. But all the while, she can feel the burn of Don John’s hand against her own, can feel him avoiding her gaze like she’ll...hurt him if he looks at her for too long.

And she bites her lip.

And she wonders.

*

And the session itself is –

Is –

She’d chosen Marc Antony’s speech for a reason; it is the perfect diatribe, in her mind, against the reputation of honorable men. But as she reads it, Kate rolls her vibrator over her clit, and Hero cannot help but feel herself fall apart.

And there is John.

Watching her.

And it is more intimate, this, than anything she ever did with Claudio; anything Claudio could have ever dreamed of. She cannot help but fall into the trap of those dark eyes as Kate drives her higher, higher, and as words fall to pieces beneath her tongue.

What’s more is the way he watches her back. She sees his dispassionate shell fall away; watches the shame of the last summer melt beneath the heat of her own gaze. By her third or fourth “honorable,” he is as lost as she is, leaning forward nearly past the camera, his eyes bright with desire.

And she –

Likes it.

Likes seeing him like this; likes this small power that she has. It feels as though a fire lights in her heart in this feeling of watching him watch her fall apart.

So she revels in it. She burns in it.

And she comes with a single whispered word from his lips.

(It feels like the universe collapsing in on itself; a moment free of shame, of history, of anything at all. It is nothingness and clenching and Kate’s soft breath on her thigh, and Hero feels nothing less than absolutely transcendent.)

By the time she settles and sings out her closing lines, Don John has all but fled from the room. Kate comes out from beneath the table and holds her through her aftershocks, humming a song Hero barely recognizes as Pietro sings her praises. They’re off for drinks before John’s even made it back into the room – and Hero feels almost guilty for that, though she knows in her head that she shouldn’t.

She – hesitates.

Looks behind her.

Then lets the moment pass.

She leaves her coat behind, and it is almost – _almost_ – an accident. Kate’s hand is in hers, dragging her down the street, and she’s laughing – lighter than she has been in the past half a year.

*

Thus, the bar.

Hero watches the way Kate’s smile ticks upward as, at the bar, someone calls her name. She leaves their conversation about her sister by the wayside and sashays away, capturing the bulk of the attention in the room that’s not dedicated to the game of footie on the tube. She shivers as the door swings open, letting in another burst of cold air.

“So you forgot your coat,” Kate drawls, both her and Hero’s drinks in hand.

Hero resists the urge to rub her arms and takes her drink in hand, instead. “...my vibrator, too,” she grumbles (a genuine mistake that she’s almost loathed to own up to).

Kate throws back her head and laughs – a gorgeous sound. “Don’t worry, duckling,” she says, a wry smile on her face. “I’m sure _Pietro_ will bring it with him when he comes to join us.”

Despite herself, Hero flushes. Kate reaches out and squeezes her hand, sympathetic and amused all at the same time.

“I don’t think I ever employed that strategy,” she admits with a grin. “But it’s not the worse idea I’ve ever heard. It does beg a better subject, though, duckling.”

Hero ducks her head and presses her smile into her drink, gently kicking Kate in the ankle as her friend continues to tease her. She reminds Hero relentlessly of Beatrice; of long nights spent whispering to one another under the covers, sharing secrets from girlhood and the years that came after.

She’s lost in Kate’s retelling of her meeting with Pietro when the man himself walks through the door. The staff don’t bother to greet him, or rather, they don’t get the chance – he’s over at their table in less than an instant.

Kate, wrenched out of her story, looks at him with a wry sort of disappointment. “And where is Hero’s coat?” she demands.

“Don’t worry, I didn’t forget it,” Pietro promises, patting Kate on the hand. He turns with a flourish, leading both women to follow his gaze –

And there is Don John.

(And there’s a voice in her head that sounds like Beatrice in her head swearing up a blue streak that’s...not overshadowed, but partnered with a sense of pride in her own machinations.)

He walks over to their table, a blip of silence in the otherwise bustling room. Hero’s coat is draped over one arm, though he’s holding it as one would a Christmas parcel instead of a piece of clothing.

To Hero’s surprise, it is Kate who tenses at his approach, not her. She watches Don John with a sense of calm she hasn’t felt since the days before last summer – and no small amount of satisfaction in her gut.

Pietro nudges his companion as the blip of silence encompasses their table. After a second, Don John all but thrusts Hero’s coat in her direction.

“You left this,” he huffs, his voice little more than a rasp.

Hero has to stand to take the coat from him – and catches the feeling of the box cradled within its folds.

She levels the briefest of glares at Kate, who busies herself checking her phone and not bothering to hide her small smile. In her distraction, Hero almost misses the way her hand brushes up against John’s cold knuckles.

He doesn’t pull back like she expects him to. Instead, he – blinks at her, and then the split-second of expression she saw on his face is set aside.

The silence carries.

Then, bless Pietro, it breaks.

“Well!” he calls, looking around at the attending party, “I’m off to get a drink. John? Usual?”

“I’m not going to stay,” John says all at once, as though he’s eager for the words to escape him. Pietro deflates immediately, while Kate makes noises that would be sad if she gave them a little more effort.

All the while, Don John looks at Hero. And she recognizes that glint in his eyes now.

Shame.

Anger.

...arousal?

Hero summons up the young woman her father taught her to be and smiles at him – a soft thing, but a smile, nonetheless. “Thank you,” she says, gathering both coat and box close to her chest.

Don John grunts. They stand in front of one another for a moment longer before he turns, ready to make his way back out of the bar again.

Hero watches him go with Pietro chasing after him, the picture of a golden retriever walking beside a disgruntled cat.

“How are you even going to get home?” she can hear him demanding. “You don’t have a car, and the nearest bus stop is….”

He trails off as the men disappear outside, the sound of the door cutting off their conversation entirely.

It’s only then that Hero realizes she’s still standing.

She hears more than sees Kate plant her face into her palm. By the time she brings herself both to look and to sit, the other woman’s taken the drink she’d already offered away from her.

“Oh, duckling,” Kate says, motioning towards the door with her straw. “That’s a mistake.”

Hero frowns. “What do you mean?”

The straw moves to point at her nose, with Kate leveling an impressive glare behind it. “Don’t ‘what do you mean’ me,” she huffs. She motions back towards the door. “He’s a piece of work, he is. It doesn’t matter how pretty he looks; that is a _mistake_.”

Hero blushes almost at once, suddenly unsure of what she should do with her hands. “I – that’s not at all –”

“Yes, it was,” Kate interrupts. She sighs and puts the straw back into her drink, then takes a long pull. Hero tries to find her voice in the brief respite she’s offered, but there’s not enough time.

“And now,” Kate continues, as dramatic as Pietro, “you’re going to spend all night mooning, and it’s going to be terrible.”

Affronted, Hero’s frown deepens. “Well if it’s both a mistake and a tragedy, what would you have me do?”

It’s meant to be a rhetorical question. Kate doesn’t let it fall to the ground where it belongs, though. Instead, she looks at Hero – really looks at her. And after a long beat, she sighs.

Before Hero can stop her, she scoots out of the booth they’ve absconded into and motions towards the door.

“You have my number, don’t you?”

Confused, Hero nods.

“Do you have condoms?”

If possible, Hero’s flush deepens. Kate groans and rustles through her purse, then throws a roll of something in Hero’s direction.

“Go,” her companion orders, pointing towards the door. “Go and get it out of your system, then call me when you’re done. I’ve been told I make a marvelous member of the clean up crew, and I have a feeling you’re going to need the help.”

Hero feels longing thrum through her body. It’s stupid, she tells herself, so stupid – but she’s on her feet before she can stop herself, her fingers tingling for want of touch.

Kate rolls her eyes at her when Hero kisses her on the cheek, but Hero thinks she sees her flush in the darkness of the bar, too.

“Go away,” she says with a gentle shove. “I hope it’s good for you.”

Despite it all, Hero laughs – a quiet thing, but a thing, nonetheless. “It may not even be a thing at all,” she says, glancing towards the door.

The last thing she hears over the bar’s relentless chatter is Kate’s exasperated groan. Then, she’s out in the middle of the street, looking both ways for any signs of that head of dark hair.

She doesn’t know this woman well enough to tell her that’s not it; that there’s something dark lingering beneath her breastbone just as there’s something hot between her legs. At the end of the day, though, she doesn’t need to. Instead, she pulls her winter coat tighter around her shoulders and watches John stumble into the distance before giving chase.

(She won’t go so far as to call it a head start, but it seems wrong, in a way, to label it in her head.)


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We did it! It's done! Enjoy the third and final installment of this piece. Thank you so much for sticking it out with me, as Christmas apparently lasted until March this year.

Winter in London is cold.

It isn’t a deep observation; Don John knows as such. The offense he takes with the local weather upon leaving the bar is baleful, at best and a reflection of his own distraction, at worst. Even so, the chill he knows he should be used to after all of this time bites a little harder after leaving Hero’s gaze. It’s hard to say what he saw in her eyes – if he saw anything at all, if it was directed at him, if that soft smile was really _his_ and not meant for some memory. All he knows for certain is that looking at her again stirred something unpleasant in his gut; something vicious and shameful that made him want to retreat back to his flat like a dog with his tail in between his legs.

Unwilling to stay in that tight space but unwilling to give the thought of that expression a glimmer of satisfaction, John puts the bar firmly to his back, shoves his hands into his pockets, and walks.

The Tube would be faster, but he marches towards Covent Garden instead, bracing against the light rain and digging his fingers into his palms. It isn’t late, but the sky is gray, and each step leaves him – wrongfooted, somehow, as though these increasingly-familiar roads are somehow twisting back on him again and again.

He goes to take an instinctive turn and has to stop himself, blinking before scowling up at the stormy sky.

“This is not Messina,” he reminds himself, voice rough with the chill and quiet in the noise of the crowd.

Another voice – one he does not recognize at first – speaks in his mind, as cold as the rain around him. “But that does not mean that you are not another villain.”

Don John closes his eyes. He forces them open a moment later and storms forward, scowling until the corners of his mouth start to ache.

“You cannot run from who you are,” the voice continues. “Would you take advantage of the girl again? Were you not satisfied with your efforts the first time around?”

It is Borachio, for a moment – then Claudio, sneering down his nose at the half-brother of the man he dares to call his lord. Don John forces himself to take a steadying breath, idly unaware of any direction he should be heading in.

The voice continues.

“Or perhaps it was the lack of consequences that bothers you the most,” it says, growing snake-like, oily. “Yes, you may no longer be welcomed in Messina, but you escaped the encounter with far fewer bruises than she did. Do you go courting your trouble, son of mine, like some guilt-wracked martyr?”

Ice settles in John’s heart, nearly bringing him to a stop. He clutches at his chest, pressing against the fabric of his coat only to feel his heart pounding underneath the fabric.

“You deserve no pardon for your actions, and you know it,” his father tsks – and John is both here and a child staring up at his father’s mahogany desk, the memory of a broken golf club resting in his hands. “Do not think that acting out, that this manipulation will earn you that which you seek.”

His breathes are coming quick, now, too quick to be healthy. They puff out in front of him, warming the frozen rain as the cold rushes into his lungs.

John peels off of the sidewalk and into a building that he does not catch the name of. His father’s disapproval is slow to leave him in peace, but the old man quiets in the sudden burst of warmth and light.

The shop he’s stumbled into is small and smells not-so-faintly of tea. By the time he looks up from his shoes and blinks, the other customers have all refocused on their books, computers, and cups in an attempt not to make eye contact.

John resists the urge to heel-turn back out onto the street. Instead, he straightens, pushes his hair back from his face, and makes his way up to the counter. In a fit of stubbornness, he orders an entire pot of tea, snags a cup from a board on the wall, then settles into a corner that lets him watch thesnow while warming his frozen hands.

He is loathed to admit it, sitting over this pot of over-steeped Earl Gray in the middle some of the coldest months of the year, but the voice in his head is not wrong. The look in Hero’s eyes – the one that warms him while it shames him – he’d wanted that. That feeling of someone seeing him, of forgetting Messina, of growing in a way he never otherwise would have under his half-brother’s shadow. It’s a relief and it isn’t enough, all in one go.

And now he’s turned down the chance to win it for himself.

Don John sits with the feeling of pride and exhaustion, stirring two lumps of sugar into his cup of tea before pressing it to his lips again.

It is not late in the day, though the hour is turning on him. Around him, the tea shop sees customers come and go. Several start to make their way into the basement, including a man who, by all accounts, should not be stumbling at this early hour. Don John watches him trip over the first of several steps and hears several voices from below the shop break into laughter. Confused, he looks over to the barista at the counter, who’s customer service smile is beginning to fracture into something a little more nervous.

She doesn’t provide him his answer, but the calendar next to her on the wall, done up in chalk, does.

Don John sneers.

Poetry night.

Perfect.

He pours himself another cup, prepared to drain the pot and make his way back out into the rain. There’s no point in lingering here save to forestall going home, and frankly, there’s no point in avoiding that any longer. He has his camera bag on him; he can put off editing Pietro’s _art_ for another night, though, and content himself with the rain, a hot shower, and whatever he has in his refrigerator that can drown out the voices in his head.

But he’s not looking at the door, too concerned with the growing crowd and the contents of his teacup. So he does not see Hero walk in; does not see the relief on her face when she spots him in his poorly-lit corner; does not see her school that expression into something sterner as she presses the rainwater out of her curls.

He does, however, hear the sound of the chair across from him scrape against the shop’s floor. He looks up, something dismissive on his tongue – and freezes like a deer caught in the headlights.

(“And how do you reconcile the image,” the voice in his head whispers – though it is not his father who speaks – “of a woman you saw in the heat of the moment and the woman you saw in death?”

“Little deaths, one in the same,” the Borachio in his mind supplies, snickering before fading into blackness again.)

Hero sits, her newly-delivered coat wrapped tightly around her shoulders. Don John stares at her, waiting for...something, anything to come out of his mouth; something stupid that he knows he’ll instantly regret.

But there’s nothing.

Instead, Hero looks at him, determination overpowering the shyness in the way she holds herself just enough to merit him a smile.

“Hello again.”

John forces his mouth closed. He pulls his hand back from his tea cup, hyper-aware of the heat in his palms as he presses both down against his thighs. “...hello.”

Hero glances down at the table; from the way she shifts, he can imagine her wringing her hands together just out of sight. “You didn’t give me much time to thank you,” she says, “for bringing me my...coat.”

Her cheeks, already red from the winter chill, color an even prettier rose. John does not allow himself to study it.

“It was no trouble,” he huffs, forcing his shoulders to relax. “...though I’m surprised you made it out the door.”

Hero lets out a breath of a chuckle. “Kate can be demanding,” she admits in what seems like a moment of camaraderie. John manages a thin smile in return, but she seems to take it in stride.

“To the point of distraction?”

“You’d be surprised.” On a whim, Hero stands and fetches a cup of her own. She hesitates on her way back to the table. John, sensing her intent, nudges the tea kettle in her direction.

Hero busies herself pouring a cup of tea, dropping in her sugar cubes before filling her cup. John watches her tap out a tune on the side of the tea pot, eyes fixed on her fingers.

“You...followed me?” he manages after a beat.

The flush on Hero’s cheeks deepens. John considers leaning forward, forcing her to make eye contact, but he holds himself back, contenting himself to watch her, instead.

When Hero does look up at him again, he cannot read the expression on her face. “I did,” she says, almost a sigh. “It...seeing you again was….”

She trails off, but John can read her meaning in the dimpling of her cheek. He does not apologize, does not interrupt her as she brings her thoughts together (though some part of him – small, a little bitter – wants to push the wound; wants to dig into that bruise until it purple for both her and for him).

When the silence drags, though, he clears his throat. Hero jolts, then ducks her head to smile at the table.

“...it was nice,” she says, almost too quietly for him to hear.

John reels back. Stares. Narrows his eyes.

“You expect me to believe that,” he says, meaning to say it as a question but letting the end of the sentence come out flat. “After...everything. All of it.”

Hero straightens her back at that, looking him full in the face. “It surprised me as much as it surprises you,” she says gently. “My memories of Messina last summer are not fond, but it is still..reassuring to know that the world still spins, is it not?”

“When one played dead for a while, I imagine so.” John pushes away from the table, collecting his coat as he does. Hero abandoned her tea cup, freshly-filled, and stands with him. She’s not nearly as tall as he is, but she puts herself between him and the door as effectively as someone double her size.

John stares down at her, frowning. “Our interactions have come to a conclusion, Hero,” he tells her. An idea creeps in, and his frown becomes a scowl. “Do not worry about the contents of these videos – they will serve Pietro’s purpose and no one else’s.”

Hero’s laughter cuts through the room like the wind just outside the door. “I had not thought you would misuse me again,” she admits, bringing her arms around her. She hesitates – and John has the moment to move around her, but despite himself, he does not. “I take it the thought crossed your mind?”

There is hurt in the way she says it. John feels it prick at him but maintains his stern expression.

“You must take better care of yourself,” he says, voice soft. The command is one-part demeaning, one-part question.

To her credit, Hero seems to pick up on his line of thought. She studies his face, ignorant, it seems, to the rest of the tea shop around them.

“I did what I did with self care in mind,” she tells him, the corner of her mouth curling into a soft smile. “It is different than anything I’ve ever done before, yes, but it was...good. All of it.”

John glances down, sees her fingers twitch over the edge of her chair. A burst of longing shoots through him, though he forces it down.

“...all of it?” The words escape him before he can stop them; too close to the heart, but there in the space between them.

Hero looks him in the eye. Her expression could pin him to the nearest wall.

“All of it.”

The voices in his head have gone blissfully silent. There is a monster, though, that lives beneath Don John’s rib cage; one that looks at the open hand Hero offers him and doubts, doubts, doubts.

“...do not pity me, Hero,” he hears himself say, miles away in his own head. “Though if you would have your revenge, I would give it to you willingly.”

He cannot make sense of the machinations behind Hero’s eyes; does not follow the downturn of her mouth. He sees her glance towards his camera bag, though, and finds his own thoughts on the process...thrown.

She stares at the bag for longer than he anticipates. Below their feet, he can hear the beginnings of what sounds like a poetry reading, lead off by someone who seems, at the least, extremely drunk.

“You can to the side of the bed

and sat staring at me.

Then you kissed me – I felt

hot wax on my forehead.”

“I would not call it revenge, John,” Hero says – and oh, there is her hand on his wrist. John inhales sharply, flexes his fingers, but does not pull away. He lets Hero’s touch encircle him like a handcuff; does not allow himself to retreat as she steps closer.

“I wanted it to leave a mark:

that’s how I knew I loved you.

Because I wanted to be burned, stamped,

to have something in the end -”

“You took from me,” she continues, her thumbs making circles on his wrist. “You and Claudio both. He hurt me, John; he would have made me black and blue with the hatred he disguised as love.”

“And you think I am the better man?” John asks her – defiant, if not for the way he is strangled by her touch.

Hero...considers him. Tilts her head like a curious creature, looking over his face for something – Don John does not know what.

“I drew the gown over my head;

a red flush covered my face and shoulders.

It will run its course, the course of fire,

setting a cold coin on the forehead, between the eyes.”

“No,” she says at last – and her eyes, they look so sad. John could drown in the beauty of them, in her sadness, and he knows in his heart that it is both what he deserves and something so far beyond him that he has no right to dream of it, let alone observe it at all.

“You are not the better man, John,” Hero says again – and her grip on his wrist tightens. John feels her tug and is compelled to follow, walking with her as they approach the door to the shop.

“You lay beside me; your hand moved over my face

as though you had felt it also -

you must have known, then, how I wanted you.”

“But I have already forgiven Claudio in my heart,” Hero tells him. She steps out into the snow. “And I would like to stop dreaming, John, of the men who once did me harm. So let me forgive you, too. Please.”

John stares at her from across the threshold. The awning protects her, but he can already see the downpour beyond her – the one that he knows will drown him.

Her grip on his wrist loosens. His hand drops back down to his side. Hero takes a step back from the door, watching and waiting – no expectation in those fair eyes, but sadness and want.

There are too many parts of him at work to question her – those parts that say he should deny her for the sake of the woman she once was; that he should deny her for his own sake; that he should deny her to spite her. But he has seen this woman in the throws of ecstasy; sat across from her as her world came crashing down; watched her reclaim what he and other men would have taken from her.

He owes her a debt, but he wants her, as well.

“Okay.”

The words are nearly lost in the sounds of the city around them. Hero hears him anyway.

“Okay.”

Don John glances back at the coffee shop as they leave together. Below his feet, the drunken slurring rambles on:

“We will always know that, you and I.

The proof will be my body.”

*

They stumble back to her flat together.

He does not touch her until they’ve passed over her threshold; doesn’t dare get within a foot of her. The only point of connection between the two of them is the hand that’s returned to his wrist; he can feel her finger twitching in time with his pulse, as though she’s reassuring herself that he’s still there.

The flat he walks into is unremarkable. There are few to no personal effects that he can see; just generic furniture and an empty space that the streetlights below them barely seems to fill.

That said, he doesn’t spend much time looking at it all.

Hero swings the door closed behind them. For a moment, there is space between them. The silence of her apartment, saving for the creak of the floorboards and the sound of her neighbors fighting, fills it.

And then –

She puts her arms around him first. In truth, she approaches him like he is a wild animal, when in reality, he feels as though he should approach her the same way. The touch of her, though, lights something deep in his belly. She slips next to him, lets him acclimate to the feel of her body – and he barely notices the way that his hands come to rest in the small of her back; the way that their breaths align when his forehead brushes against hers.

John stares at her lips for far too long. He memorizes the way they quirk when she smiles, the dimple in the corner that, were he a more poetic man, he’d call a hidden kiss.

It doesn’t stay hidden for long.

Hero has to rise up onto her toes to kiss him, but bless her, she does. John feels her sigh against him, feels the whole of her press into him –

and he lets go.

One of his hands winds its way into her hair. The curls fit sweetly around his fingers as he settles in; Hero lets him cup the back of her head and draw her closer, in and in and in. She is cool like the winter is, but he is warm enough for the both of them, backing her slowly up against the door and crowding her. After a moment, he feels one of her hands tug on his tie, and he nearly loses his breath for it.

She undoes his tie without ever breaking from his lips. He nudges her thighs apart even as she undoes the buttons of his shirt, as she forces him out of his jacket. So unsure of what to do with his hands, he lets her guide them, moving from her lips to the crook of her neck. He feels as though he should whisper something there, some prayer, some request for forgiveness.

The words, though, do not come.

So he kisses her instead, matching pace with her pulse. The hand on her back dips lower, collecting her and dragging her against him so that he can hear the way her breath hitches.

She must be the one who pushes them away from the door; he can barely bring himself to move, let alone think. It is her, then, who abandons his tie on the floor and tosses his jacket after it. It is Hero who forces him to kick off his shoes and who abandons her own next to them.

He watches her, hands still on her hips, as she undoes the clasp of her necklace, as she removes her earrings. John rests his lips on the crown of her head and presses up against her as she does, listening to her breaths grow more and more ragged.

By the time she turns, her honey eyes have given way to dark pupil. He stares down at her and knows, in an instant, that he is lost.

Her sheets are pedestrian, but neither of them have the thought to care. She guides him to the bed and pushes him onto his back, letting his shirt fall open on either side of him as she does. He raises his hands to help her, but she bats him away, pulling her own shirt off before pressing against his chest. The cool touch of her bra makes him hiss, but he’s able, in that moment, to press his hips against hers and feel what little warmth does radiate off of her.

When she kisses him again, he feels his head spin (and this is what he wanted, sitting at that table across from her; this and this and nothing else).

He does not stop her as she takes the lead. Her leggings fall down around her ankles; his belt ends up...somewhere in her room. Only when she allows him does he cup her breasts in his hands, thumbing her nipples and relishing the way she wiggles on top of him. Hero grinds against him while he’s still in his dress pants, her breaths coming hot and heavy before she presses her face into the crook of his neck.

She bites. John gasps and swears from shock alone, then lets the feeling sink into another wave of unrelenting lust.

(She leaves him with more than one of these gifts, Hero does; when he catches her expression, he thinks it surprises her more than it does him.)

She demands his fingers before she deigns to take him, and he is more than willing to do as she bids. They maneuver her onto her back, and he has the pleasure of pressing himself into her thigh as she cups her own breasts, as she sucks on her fingers as one, two, three of his fingers enter her. John is not a foolish man; he lavishes her with attention, tenderly stroking her clit until she is shaking around him, on the verge of tipping over.

On an undeniable urge, he presses a kiss to her clit.

Hero spills over into her orgasm, drawing him close with a high-pitched moan.

(He may imagine his name on her lips, something of a whisper in her aftershocks; it’s hard to tell.)

John does not resist when she pushes him back onto his back; helps her slip a condom over his cock. He does not complain when her wetness streaks across his dress pants. Instead, he welcomes her with open arms, reaching up to grab her hips and tug as she settles herself on top of him. The noise he makes when he enters her does not bear repeating, but he loses himself in the feel, in the heat, even as her too-cool hands drag patterns across his chest.

He does not finish before she does; he does not let himself. Only when Hero shakes apart on top of him does he dare to even try, bucking up and gasping at the touch of her lips against his jaw.

“Cum, John,” he hears her whisper before worrying his earlobe. “Cum.”

The choked noise he makes as she does as she says echoes through the room, through the apartment, out onto the streets of London. The world is still spinning when he opens his eyes – but there’s Hero smiling down at him, a goddamn halo around her head.

John can’t help it; he props himself up on his elbows as quickly as he can and kisses her; really kisses her.

(And Hero – Hero does not stop him.)

*

He does not leave her before morning, though, in his heart, he is tempted to. Instead, John watches her as she sleeps long past the rising of the sun. He does not touch her until she wakes and drags his hands back to her, settling one beneath her head and the other around her waist.

For an instant, he is blindingly, stupidly happy. His heart is not a peaceful place, but in this illusion – in this world where he holds her and there is no vengeance between them, where there is only Hero in the mornings and pillows that smell like her – he can set aside those wars that he ever wishes to wage. He is already older than his bones, but this is one of the first times he settles into them, and it feels –

It feels –

(He has to leave.)

*

They linger in that space for as long as good sense will let them. Hero offers to make him breakfast when they finally do rise, but John has seen enough.

He kisses her knuckles before he leaves, not daring to look up and meet her gaze.

Then, he goes.

*

She disappears after Pietro’s project goes live.

John does not go looking for her – avoids the roads that would walk him past her apartment, ignores the twitching fingers that want to search for her online. He goes with Pietro to his live viewing of the videos but leaves before hers can play, lingering only to congratulate – if the world can be appropriately used – Pietro on the uncomfortable silence that his art elicits from his critics. Kate watches him with an unforgiving eye, but she is cordial when they shake hands and go to part ways. Pietro, of course, is quick to invite him to participate in his next project, but John decides it in his best interest to decline.

He stays in London until his lease is up. As winter gives way to spring and then to summer, he packs his things, locks the bulk of them in a storage unit, and goes.

It takes years for him to return to Sicily. By the time he does, the events of both the summer in Messina and the winter afterward have faded from the minds of those in the area. Only Beatrice and her husband seem to remember; both avoid him when he goes to make amends with his half-brother, who welcomes him with a reluctant but welcoming hand. He is married now to a woman John does not recognize; there is a child, too, who hides behind her mother’s legs but who comes out to greet him when Pedro introduces her “Uncle John.”

John goes down on one knee to shake her hand. It leaves his half-brother and his wife laughing, though the little girl – Carina – makes the affair just as solemn as he does, her bright eyes meeting his with a seriousness he’s only ever seen in the mirror.

He does not intend to stay in the area up until then. But after meeting Carina, he finds he can’t help it. It isn’t difficult to find a place to stay on the island, and his work has allowed him to make abrupt changes in the past. He unwillingly accepts Pedro’s weekly invitations to dinner in between the projects he takes on in the area, though he spends the bulk of his time talking with Carina while the adults in the room bicker of play games.

(He suspects Pedro knows this and gets something out of it. Whenever he thinks to bring it up, though, Carina asks another demanding question about his time abroad or his latest project, and he can’t bring himself to deny her an answer.)

The hair around his temples has started to go gray by the time Hero returns to Messina.

He comes home on leave from an indie project in the Maldives with a miniature dhonis for Carina tucked into his pocket. His niece is too old, her father tells him, for the trinkets he brings along, but John knows the way her eyes light up when he steps into a room; knows about the china cabinet she restored with his help to store every strange item he was able to sneak into her grubby little hands. She greets him at the front gates of her father’s estate, leaping away from the front porch and her book to throw her arms around his neck.

John still does not laugh easily, but he knows Carina feels the huff of his smile as he takes her up in his arms.

“Uncle John,” the girl says, kicking him gently in the shin when he puts her back on the ground. “Dad asked you to warn him when you were coming home again.”

“Didn’t I?” John adopts a look of confusion lined with his trademark boredom. “What a pity. I imagine he’s too busy to stop me from taking you to dinner, then.”

Carina’s eyes light up, but the energy is quick to soften in favor of a pout impressively convincing, despite her age. “I wish,” she grouses, linking their arms together. “He has _company_ over that I’m supposed to meet.”

John does not complain as she starts to lead him inside; he’s long learned not to fight Carina on her whims, even when they involve his half-brother. “Company is the worst,” he agrees, a little too honest to be playful. “How dare he.”

Carina snorts, not bothering to hide her grin.

John doesn’t bother to look for clues to his half-brother’s companions in the foyer. Pedro has and always will be a popular man; company is as common at his estate as John himself is.

Carina guides him into the dining room, anyway, ignoring her uncle’s dour expression in favor of chatter about her school days and the college applications Pedro wants her to complete by next Monday.

John – hears her. Maybe. But the doors to Pedro’s dining room part, introducing not only his half-brother and his wife but a figure he hasn’t seen in quite some time.

Hero’s hair is as curly as ever, even cropped as close to her head as it is now. She turns with the rest of them to look towards the door – and yes, there; she has no wrinkles yet, but John can see age on her, sitting as comfortably as a winter coat.

There is no ring on her left hand. He doesn’t know why he notes it.

“Dad!” Carina sing-songs across the dining room. “Uncle John’s home!”

Pedro, given all the years of strangeness between the two of them, may cross his arms over his chest but only manages to look exasperated. “Of course he is,” he sighs, shaking his head. “Brother, we live in the age of cellphones and 5G. Did you lose your phone on a shoot again, or do you just time your visits to better throw a wrench into my plans?”

It takes John longer than he’d like to answer. When he manages, he wrenches his eyes away from Hero and focuses instead on his kin.

(He does not see Carina look between the two of them; does not see the clever smile that comes and goes from her lips.)

“You know the answer to that question,” he replies, flat as a brick and nearly as dry. After a moment, though, he manages a heartbeat of a smile.

Pedro throws up his hands, then waves at one of his staff. The man comes and goes from the room, bringing another chair along with him.

“Hero,” Don Pedro declares, turning to nod his head towards their guess. “I have no doubt that you remember my unfortunate brother.” He seems to remember himself at the last moment, then clears his throat and rubs the back of his neck. “I...suppose this may be more awkward than I anticipated, though the years are many between the lot of us.”

John risks another glance in Hero’s direction. He finds her hiding a smile in the corners of her mouth and warms, despite himself.

“It is not I you need to worry yourself over, sir,” she tells him, her voice as musical as ever. “Be thankful, though, John, that you did not come home to greet my cousin for dinner.”

“The lady and I have met in your absence,” John acknowledges – and he can barely look at her, she shines so brightly (age, it seems, suits her).

“A shame.” Hero smiles and shakes her head, an image of the cousin not here. “I would have liked to see that.”

John deposits Carina at her spot at the table, ignoring the curious tap tap tapping of her fingers on his arm, even as he walks away.

Dinner passes peaceably, even with Pedro’s awkward attempts to bridge a tension that...isn’t there. John ignores the looks both Carina and his half-brother throw him, leaning in, instead, to listen to his niece bemoan her upcoming finals and Hero discuss her travels with his sister-in-law. By the time the meal comes to an end, there’s a lightness in his chest that leaves him wrong-footed as he goes to stand from the table.

Carina goes to leave the villa with him, but both Pedro and Hero beat her to it. Her father shoos her away, much to her distress, but John takes a long moment to wrap her in a hug and to press his present into her hands.

“You’re going to tell me what’s going on, right?” she whispers, her arms thrown around his neck.

John presses a kiss to her forehead and, on a whim, winks. His niece grins at him, bold and as brash as her father, as he steps into the hall and the arms of his waiting companions.

Pedro kisses him on both cheeks before he departs, offering Hero the same courtesy. He looks between the two of them before chasing after his daughter, confusion written in with the pleasure on his face.

“It is good to see the both of you again,” he tells them, momentarily ignoring Carina as she calls his name. “It reminds me of a younger time.”

Hero smiles at him as he departs, leaving John to stand at her side, hands shoved into his pockets like he’s that same boy Pedro speaks of, young and angry and unsure of what to do with himself.

They stand in that front hall together for longer than they probably should. It is Hero, though, who clears her throat first and who starts to walk them out towards the door.

“I’d heard you were living in the area,” she says. “When did you decide to come home?”

“Sooner than I thought,” John admits. He grimaces as the setting Messina sun hits him in the eyes. “But sooner than you did, I see.”

Hero lets out the softest laugh. John glances down at her and sees the lines around her eyes deepen. His heart jolts almost painfully in his chest, and he forces himself to look away.

“My father’s dying,” she tells him – a somber thought in the peaceful evening. “And I think I’ve spent enough years pretending that this place doesn’t define me.”

“I imagine you’re staying with your cousin?”

“Until I find a place of my own,” Hero hums. She glances at him sidelong – and he knows her a little better now, even all these years later. He can see the amusement in her eyes. “And what of you?”

They walk to the end of Don Pedro’s long drive together. John can already see one of the staff bringing around a car; his own motorcycle is still parked by the front entrance.

“I’m on my own,” he tells her in the moments they have left. “I’m...not here as often as I could be. Work keeps me busy.”

Hero looks at him – really looks at him as the car comes around and the driver hops out, ready to open her door for her. She hesitates before she slides inside.

Don John does not flush under her scrutiny; it’s not in his blood. He looks back, instead, marking the places where her wrinkles might come in, given the passage of time.

“Don’t be a stranger, John,” Hero tells him – and her hand brushes over his; a cool touch against hot knuckles. “We...could do dinner sometime.”

He is too old for this feeling, he reminds himself; this uneven pitter-patter in his chest. John grits his teeth against it and manages a nod – opens his mouth to say something, but finds the words wanting.

Hero, bless her, seems to understand. Her touch leaves his hand.

John stays in the driveway as her car departs, taking her away from him once again.

(If he doubles back, asks Pedro for Beatrice’s address – well. His half-brother doesn’t ask questions, but his niece, still lingering, throws back her head and laughs long after her uncle has left the premises.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poem referenced here is called "The Encounter," by Louise Gluck.

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you thought!


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